Treat your employees well

Cambridge Times

Smart employers recognize their employees as business assets. An employer can’t provide excellent customer service without good, dedicated staff to help them. It is usually easy to hire staff. The challenge as a business owner is training and keeping the good ones. If you treat them as an asset, you should always be looking for ways to keep employees satisfied and productive.

Many employers believe that competitive wages and benefits are what keep staff happy. That may be part of the answer, and certainly above-average wage and extended health benefits are attractive to workers. But, this alone will not keep you ahead of the competition. If you want to keep good staff, you need to do things differently than everybody else. This is where you need to think of unique ways to recognize and value your employees.

A client of mine recently started a business to help employers manage, order and deliver lunch time meals to their work place as a “thank you” to their workers. Some order once or twice a week, and others choose special occasions throughout the year to do this. My client takes care of all the details of ordering, paying the restaurant and arranging the delivery of the custom ordered lunch.

Here is another staff appreciation idea that won’t cost you anything if you already offer extended health benefits to your employees. Look at hiring a massage therapist to come into your office once or twice a month and provide a stress relieving chair massage to your hardworking staff. In most cases, your employees can claim the treatment from extended health benefits and be reimbursed the full amount of the massage.

The key is to come up with ideas that say to your employees that you really value them.

Roy Weber is the advisor at the Waterloo location of the Waterloo Region Small Business Centre, roy.weber@waterloo.ca. Visit Jennifer Penney at the Cambridge office, 50 Dickson St. or call 740-4615.